


The Truth of Wings

by Lyrstzha



Category: Firefly
Genre: Alternate Reality, Angst, Character Study, Gen, potential Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-14
Updated: 2007-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrstzha/pseuds/Lyrstzha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A number of possible disasters might have occurred to keep River and Simon off of Serenity; one step the wrong way, and destiny could have worn a darker face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Truth of Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ana-_grrl's Random Title Generator Challenge.

River only sees probability sometimes, and just from the corner of her eye, possibilities kaleidoscoping at the edge of her peripheral vision like a trick of the light. It makes her nauseous and dizzy. It's disconcerting enough to see out of other people's eyes and into their heads; having to watch potentialities that weren't quite realized is downright head-splitting. She yowls with the pain of it, curling in tight on herself to press her forehead against her knees.

"No, no, shh, we'll be fine," Simon murmurs to her, wrapping his arms around her protectively and rubbing a comforting hand up and down her back. "The lawman is gone now. He's not going to take you back. _No one_ is going to take you back."

River _knows_ the lawman's gone, of course. She knows it better than Simon does. She can feel the faint, fading spark of Agent Dobson's life falling quickly away behind them. That isn't what's hurting her now.

River takes a deep breath to settle her heaving stomach and tries to tell Simon. "For want of a nail the shoe was lost," she says, as patiently as she can manage. "For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost." She tilts her head, bird-like and intent. "All for the want of a horseshoe nail," she whispers fiercely.

But she can't show him, can't make him see the visions crawling at the borders of her consciousness. The images flicker in and out, almost too fast for her to follow.

 

_Flicker._

_"Wait a tick, yeah. Some years back, there was call for workers to settle on Miranda. Daddy talked about it."—Kaylee_

Zacharias Frye up and takes his family to Miranda—they need the work something fierce, and things don't look to be getting easier back home anytime soon. And the adverts have it right; there's room for mechanics on Miranda, and the Fryes don't do half badly there.

There's enough fat in the budget to even put a little coin by for schooling someday, which is good, because Zacharias' daughter is clever with her hands. He thinks she might make an engineer one day, if he can save up enough to send her to a fancy Core-world University. He likes to think of his little girl designing ships and machines and satellites and such; he imagines that she'll never need to scour engine oil from her hands with harsh lye soap the way that he does. Someday, his Kaylee will be ordering grease monkeys like him around. It'll be a better world for her.

But then Parliament gets the bright idea to test Pax on Miranda. The compound is odorless and colorless, and it doesn't even stain the clear, blue sky of a lovely Sunday afternoon or taint the fresh scent of the breeze.

When it happens, little Kaylee is watching with big eyes as Zacharias tinkers with a cantankerous hover-mule. He puts a wrench in her soft, child-plump fingers and shows her where to press and turn and coax to make the hydraulics purr like they ought to. Already she cocks her head like she can hear the voice of the engine speaking to her, whispering softly in a language of gears and combustion that she can almost decipher. With a few more years practice, she could be a wonder.

But now she lies down beside her daddy, the wrench still in her hand. Long after the fingers that hold it go to dust, the fine chrome-plated steel alloy gleams on the garage floor in the sporadic sunshine from the skylight like something precious.

Under the unexceptional hand of Bester, _Serenity_ does not sing with her full voice. He misses little things she needs, sometimes even big things. It's true that Mal can't always afford the ideal parts to work with, but also Bester doesn't nurse her along as well as he might, and the catalyzer on the port compression coil blows months before it might have under a surer mechanic.

There isn't anyone there to tell the crew that the cold will kill them before the lack of air does, but they find out for themselves just the same.

 

_Flicker._

_"I stole that money from Higgins, like the song says. Lifted me one of his hover-planes, but I got tagged by anti-aircraft. Started losin' altitude - had to dump them strongboxes of money to stay airborne."—Jayne_

Even dumping the strongboxes isn't enough to keep Jayne from going down on Higgins' Moon. Like Stitch, he survives the drop—and Jayne doesn't even lose an eye to show for it, either. He crawls out of the wreck with a shattered leg and a few broken ribs, all of which could be mended right enough with a little doctoring. _Could_ be but aren't, because Higgins has him shot right in the center of town as an example to the Mudders barely an hour after the wreck.

Less than a week later, the Mudders revolt. They storm Magistrate Higgins' estate with Jayne's name on their lips as a rallying-cry. When the dust clears, the Mudders are actually a little surprised to find themselves free and in control of their very own moon. They're even more surprised to discover that making mud is actually a lot more pleasant when they're working for their own business. They rename their home Jayne's Moon, and their children swear by Jayne the Martyr for generations.

Mostly Mal and Zoë handle jobs fine on their own, and Mal is wary about hiring on merc-types. Hard to be sure someone like that won't try to kill him and Zoe in their sleep and steal the ship. He keeps an eye open for likely-looking candidates, but he doesn't see any need to rush into anything.

Still, when it comes time to leave a tied-up Fed and a pair of fugitives onboard in order to go deal with Patience, an extra gunhand would be a fine thing. Mal sends Zoë up to scout out Patience's sniper, but that leaves him alone down in the valley. All the quick-drawing and quick-thinking in the 'Verse aren't enough to outweigh superior numbers; there's a lesson, Mal thinks fleetingly, that he really ought to have learned from Serenity Valley.

He bleeds out in the sand from a bullet in the throat before Zoë can shoot all of Patience's thugs. The whole disaster takes too long, and Wash will not leave without his wife; _Serenity_ is still on the ground when the Reavers come.

River can sense the weapon-self sleeping inside her. It feels cold and sharp and scary and not like a girl at all. It stirs when the Reavers come, shifts inside her skull restlessly.

But everything's colored with pain and confusion and fear, and it's all moving too fast. That weapon is a sword she doesn't know how to wield yet. When the Reavers catch hold of her and wrench her from Simon's arms, she can _almost_ see what the weapon would do, see the pattern of motions that would rend throats and snap necks until no monster lived in this room but her. She sees, but she does not comprehend; it's all theoretical vectors of force that don't seem to translate to concrete action.

She wails, "Wake up, wake up, be steel and fire and blood," in a high, despairing cry, like it's all one word. For the first and last time, she wishes she were more weapon and less girl.

Simon's voice, harsh with several kinds of pain, cuts across hers. "Eta kooram nas mech," he rasps thickly, all the protection he can offer her now.

River lies down.

 

_Flicker._

_"Hey, I've been in a firefight before. Well, I was in a fire. Actually, I was fired from a frycook opportunity..."—Wash_

Wash, to pretty much everyone's shock including his own, does not get fired from his frycook opportunity. On his very first day, he _doesn't_ accidentally light his employer's pants on fire with burning grease, nor does he blacken an entire shipment of potatoes into unrecognizable charcoal. Sure, he fails to make anything even remotely edible in the whole of his first week, but by the week after that he really begins to get the hang of things.

By the third month, Wash starts to shape up into a surprisingly good cook. He starts to branch out to dishes that don't involve smoking vats of grease at all. By the sixth month, folks come from miles around for his cooking, and word-of-mouth has even spread far enough to bring in spacers whose ships are in port. He'd only planned to keep the job long enough to save up enough money for pilot school, but being so good at something is a heady feeling. And how likely is it he'd be such a dab hand at piloting?

Wash still dreams sometimes about seeing the stars; his specialty is a cake decorated with lit sparklers that twinkle like he imagines stars must do up in the black. But he's got a pretty good life, and he figures there's not a person breathing who doesn't have a few wistful moments now and again. He's happy enough.

Mal finds a dour yet reliable pilot named Gerhardt to fly _Serenity_. Gerhardt's pretty good at his trade by anyone's lights, even if he's kind of cold company around the dinner table of an evening. Even Kaylee can't get that man to smile.

It isn't Gerhardt's fault that he can't quite pull off a Crazy Ivan in atmo under Reaver pursuit, because the very idea is rutting insane anyway. It would take some kind of virtuoso pilot with rock-steady nerves to bring off a maneuver like that with a worn, weathered Firefly. His timing isn't absolutely perfect, and the magnetic grapple from the Reaver's ship catches them amidships just as he's reversing to go for full burn. The sudden drag and pull rips both ships right out of the sky and sends them burning to the parched earth of Whitefall below.

The blaze burns bright for hours, and it leaves a rime of glass in the surviving crater.

 

_Flicker._

_"We're not gonna die. We can't die, Bendis. You know why? Because we are so very pretty. We are just too pretty for God to let us die."—Mal_

Mal is cut down in Serenity Valley. It's nothing much glorious, just a stray shot that might have come from anywhere, and even Zoë isn't exactly sure when he died. After a long night of fitful sleep huddled on cold ground and plagued by an empty belly, she stirs and turns to Mal as she always does, only to find him cold and still beside her, looking out at some horizon she can't see.

After the war is over, Zoë goes home to work on her family's ship. It's not easy for her to re-adjust to that life, but she manages more or less. Time comes when some days she doesn't even think about the war. But she still makes the pilgrimage to Serenity Valley once a year to leave a stone on the marker she raised for Mal. In later years she'll bring her daughter Malaya with her and tell old war stories that the girl will only half believe.

Worlds away, an old, dilapidated Firefly-class ship slowly rusts into oblivion in a junkyard. Eventually she's cannibalized for parts, because no one is fool enough to buy such a broken-down, deathtrap wreck.

A few shady-looking characters who might have haunted the Core, prowling around Alliance facilities and blackout zones and making as much trouble as possible, never make it out of Serenity Valley. One crazy sergeant who kept fighting long after the battle was lost, who kept rallying the survivors while they waited for _anyone_ to come for them—that would have made more difference than anyone suspects.

Because this small band of resistance isn't there, there's no one to help Simon when he goes looking for River. A few years and numerous attempts to break into the Academy see him destitute and waiting in a jail cell for a father who won't come, while River waits in her own cage for a brother who can't.

 

_Flicker._

_"I don't give half a hump if you're innocent or not. So where does that put you?"—Book_

Blind belief is easier and far more comfortable than finding one's own answers. It feels good—it feels _righteous_—not to question. The Operative has a qualm or two in the privacy of his own head, but he quashes them firmly; he is an instrument, and if he does not have faith in those that use him, then everything he has done on their behalf has no purpose, no justification.

That is altogether too terrible and heavy a thought to bear, so he doesn't. He will never wear the name Book, never seek a higher power than Parliament, never walk away from everything he has become in search of another path. He will never be more than an Operative.

Without Book's intervention, when Agent Dobson confronts Mal and Simon, things get out of hand. Dobson is fairly new at his job, and more than a little twitchy. And Mal does not take well to hearing that his whole crew is going to be held culpable for transporting a fugitive. They both get shots off, and there's too much blood and confusion to sort out what's happened in the twenty minutes left before the Alliance arrives on the scene.

By the time Mal wakes up, dizzy from blood loss and nursing a hideous headache from a bullet-graze carved into his skull, he's in a holding cell on an Alliance cruiser and there are some very unforgiving people waiting to talk to him about the slain Fed on his boat. It's a good long while before he and his breathe free again.

But it's much longer for River and Simon.

 

_Flicker._

_"I expect they plan to pick at us a spell before they charge. They had two scouts sniffin', about ten yards out, but I took 'em down."—Zoë_

Even the best, stealthiest soldiers—and Zoë is certainly that—have their bad days. She goes out for a quiet bit of recon in the night, but she doesn't come back. Mal returns to camp to find Tracey and their battle-addled lieutenant dead. He waits anyway, much longer than is wise, hoping Zoë will make her way back. When he can't hold the position anymore, he makes a run for it and tries to cut across and join up with the 22nd. Alliance forces bring him down with a bullet in the leg before he gets more than a quarter mile.

Mal spends the rest of the war in a holding camp. He looks for Zoë, but she's not among the pinch-faced prisoners there. After he's finally released, Mal looks up her family. He figures he owes her that, at least. He can't tell them exactly how she died, but he can tell them that she was the best soldier he knew in the whole gorram war, and that he's sure she went out on her feet and fighting. He can't make out if they find it a comfort, but it's all he's got to offer.

Zoë was the last of Mal's unit, and feeling responsible for her—even though, often as not, it was _her_ who looked after _him_—could have kept him moving forward, moving on. Instead he takes odd jobs here and there, and doesn't give much thought to building a future for himself in the post-war 'Verse. Eventually, he hires on with his old war buddy Monty, who doesn't really need the extra hand on his ship, but isn't about to turn Mal away.

Mal makes a pretty good gunhand, and, when canny old Sivitri retires from the job five years later, an even better first officer. He always has Monty's back, except when they're on Persephone, because Badger gets on fine with Monty but has just never taken to Mal at all well. Anytime they need to deal with Badger, Monty leaves Mal guarding the ship. It's best for everybody that way.

So it is that Mal stays behind to find them a few passengers when they touch down at Eavesdown Docks. They're not doing so badly that they _need_ the fares, but extra coin is always welcome. He's surly enough to make a Shepherd think twice about shipping out with them, but Mal finds a couple of young men looking for passage easily enough. He sees them safely stowed aboard and trundles off to his bunk; he's got watch on ship's-night, and he needs his sleep beforehand.

By the time he wakes to a ruckus and charges out of his bunk to see what's in the offing, both passengers have already been packed into the spare shuttle and are being launched into the black.

Befuddled, Mal gestures at the departing shuttle with the unholstered gun he still holds. "I miss somethin' overly vital?"

"Not 'specially," Monty answers with a shrug. "Had us a fugitive and a Fed aboard, is all. An' a stolen box, apparently. Now we don't. Alliance'll be along soon to pick 'em up, an' we're well out of it."

"Huh." Mal blinks thoughtfully. "Wonder what that was all about."

Monty shakes his head. "Ain't no matter. Let them Core-folk chase each other about all they want. Don't concern us or ours."

"No, Sir," Mal replies dutifully. "Don't conjure it does."

 

_Flicker._

_"Don't be ridiculous. You're going to rent this shuttle to me."—Inara_

Except Mal doesn't. He doesn't like Inara's certainty; it makes him contrary. It reminds him too much of the smug, self-assured attitude of the Alliance, always sticking their noses in a man's life, thinking they know best and telling him how to do every little thing.

"Ain't sleepin' with the enemy on my own damn boat," he growls to Zoë. "'Specially not as literally as she'd be doin' it. We don't need her."

And Zoë shrugs and doesn't argue the point, because while she can see the pragmatic use of having Inara around, she's not bothered overmuch either way.

And sure, it would have been a handy thing to have a Companion onboard sometimes. There's a few places that they could've docked if Inara had been with them, places that turn them away cold without that added air of respectability that a real, live Companion could have lent them. There's a few jobs they could've taken that they just can't get close to. They might have stayed further from the raggedy edge of getting by if they'd had Inara aboard.

As it is, they limp around a bit slower than they otherwise might have, taking some unpleasant jobs Mal would rather not and passing a few better ones by just on account of the fuel they haven't got to spare. Badger waves them from Persephone with an offer of a illicit salvage run, but they're a whole week away and they just can't scrape together enough coin to get there, so they take a small smuggling job on the much nearer Paquin instead.

"A bird in the hand," Mal grumbles wearily, "is worth two in a bush when the bush is out across a lake and a body can't swim."

Wash shakes his head with mock solemnity and gravely asks,"Don't you hate it when bad things happen to perfectly good proverbs?"

"Even more'n I do when they happen to perfectly good pilots," Mal snorts. And they go on about their smuggling without another word said about the job they couldn't take.

When Simon prowls Eavesdown Docks, looking for a ship to take him and the frozen River safely off and into the sky, his step falters at a particular spot for no reason he can see. He stumbles a little and looks up at an empty space where there's nothing but dust and sunshine. When the gust from a ship landing nearby rushes through that gap, it makes no sound. Simon shakes off a sudden pang of grief that he can't make sense of at all; he goes on with the careful but desperate business of finding a ship.

They're in the black on _Brutus_ less than a full day before the crew hands Simon and River over to the indifferent mercies of an Agent Dobson. By the time River wakes up, she's back at the Academy, and she's never entirely sure if she dreamed the whole thing or not.

There's no one left to come for them, and it's a long, long time before the Alliance is done with River.

 

All these things could have happened. Just a different turn _here_ or moment's hesitation _there_, and these visions might have been truth. They're plausible and easy and so vivid that River can't tell which one is real until she feels the ship around her lurching dizzily and leaping into full burn hard away from Whitefall. She sits up in the sheltering circle of Simon's arms and tips her head back. A laugh that is bright with joy and giddy with relief bubbles out of her throat to echo off the metal walls around her.

Possibly River sounds a little hysterical, because Simon, his face tight with worry, murmurs, "It's all right, _mei mei_. It's all right. We're safe." But she can tell he thinks he might be lying. He doesn't understand.

"Safe as houses made of brick," she says. "Walled around by temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." She smiles brilliantly at Simon as he blinks at her, totally lost. "Serendipitous _Serenity_ synchronicity," she explains, and it seems utterly simple and clear to her, but she can tell it doesn't help him at all.

Simon smooths River's hair with one hand like she's a wild animal that needs gentling. Possibly, she thinks, this is not entirely inaccurate. "We're all right," he repeats. "We'll find a good place to get off this ship and I'll take us somewhere safe. I won't let anyone hurt you again."

River lets out a wordless cry of frustration, because he simply doesn't fathom how precious and precarious this fate, here and now, really is. She's exhausted and wrung-out just seeing the might-have-beens that lay like quicksand at every other turn.

River leans in closer to Simon, fisting his shirt in one hand, trying to make him understand by sheer emphasis and force of will. She tries a new analogy. "Pinion feathers," she says gravely, the words tumbling out quickly in her eagerness to make this clear for him. "Metacarpo-digitals. The principal source of thrust, move a bird up through the air. Need each one for strong, stable flight. Miss one, just one, and risk not flying true. _The truth of wings_," she hisses feelingly at Simon. River can see the structure of a wing in her mind, delicate and light and perfect. Balanced as well as a weapon, but so much better, so much less terrible. This is what she wants to believe she can be, if she tries hard enough to be a girl, to be part of this new home. She whispers, "I want to be a feather. Want to root deep in skin and bone, help her fly. They'll want me then, can't let me be ripped away. Necessary, needed."

Simon shakes his head a little, still stroking her hair. "_I_ need you, _mei mei_." Which is warm and loving and good to hear, but he's obviously still not following her.

River sighs, half affection and half exasperation. "You can be a _tail_ feather," she tells him with a quirk of her lips. But he'll see, sooner or later. They all will, if she's strong enough make herself a feather, too.

_Serenity_ soars free and clear, tracing an arc of triumphant fire against the stars.


End file.
